Slashdot Mirror
OpenOffice 2.0 vs. Microsoft Office
Jane Walker writes "Slashdot's own Robin 'Roblimo' Miller compares OpenOffice 2.0 and Microsoft Office in a recent interview with TechTarget and, when asked to identify one of the main obstacles facing widespread adoption, calls for the OSS community to deliver personable, usable training for new OpenOffice and open source software users."
I do think the author is missing the point of Outlook in that for some people its just an email client and Thunderbird would work. What he misses is the shared calanders, remote mailboxes, offline working etc all which middle managers need to work. They stick with outlook as it has a good feature set for them. Users want things to "just work" and not have to worry about compatilbity or similar
SolarVPS - Quality Windows and Linux Virtual Servers
How much bloody longer is this asinine OO.org vs. MS Office "debate" going to rage on? Just choose one and use it, 'cause this is getting old. And as for "personable and usable training", I've found it doesn't matter what suite They are using, calling out "James! How do I..." remains the favoured approach in my immediate viscinity.
A CBT [Computer Based Training] module for OOo should go a long way to increase awareness about typing letters in it. Most proprietary s/w vendors have a link called "demo" which does not lead to a demo version of the s/w but to a video which shows how the thing can be used. Most people on /. may not require it, but my dad sure would like it.
Also, even in a corporate world people use MS Office because its already installed on their workstations and can ask the person sitting next to them how to "bold" a word.
It is usually just one person who creates a template for printing a letter and the admin/HR person just has to fill in the values for the fields to get a printout of the letter.
So if one addresses training for these key people, (including the CXOs) I guess adoption would be more widespread.
-- Prem
Aiming to tweet on a rice
.... but I can't. Training doesn't seem to be in demand. I've never been asked for it, few other companies I know have ever been asked for it. There's an organisation in the UK who are funded to give training in free software to local small businesses, and have a good marketing budget. They get interest in mono, PHP, that kind of thing. OpenOffice.org training they can't even give away.
And his remarks about OOo Base are a bit off. It's a buggy application, and unsuitable for "real" work. Believe me, I've tried. It's impossible to use the forms without resorting to macros (you can't even make a button on a form open a different form when it's clicked without writing a custom macro), and it has no equivalent to Access's switchboard. Sure, the reports, forms, etc. may all be there, but without a switchboard you only have Base's bizarre UI which no end-user will ever get.
It sickens me that OOo doesn't seem to excite people. I can't understand why businesses seem so happy dropping so much money on Office, and aren't willing to investigate alternatives. For most people, especially those using the wordprocessor, and maybe spreadsheets, OOo is more than good enough.
"Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
There is still the lack of uptodate printed manuals and dummy books that the new user could handily refer to, when it comes to OOo, whereas MS-Office had numerous books since the earliest versions.
... Carpe diem."
-----------
"I do not wish to realise when I die, that I had not lived
First of all, let me start by saying that for 90% of what I do, I love OpenOffice. However, I'm one of these constructively lazy people who would rather spend twenty minutes writing up a macro to save me a couple of hours than spending, well, a couple of hours doing it the manual way.
Unfortunately, I detest the macro creation/editing facility in OpenOffice. Just as a side-by-side test, I just popped open a document, recorded a macro to insert the words "This is a test!" and went in the edit (presumably, to customize) the macro.
Here's what I get in OpenOffice:
Jesus, that's a lot of lines just to insert a few words of text! And if I wanted to customize it, I wouldn't have a clue where to begin! Microsoft Word, on the other hand, gives me this:
Wow! I'm really not just cherry-picking one rare example. As the tasks get more difficult, the macro code gets exponentially harder in OpenOffice than in Microsoft's apps. In my experience, macro editing in OpenOffice is like pulling teeth, but so easy that even I can do it in Microsoft Office applications.
Like I said, in my day-to-day dealings, I use OpenOffice. The applications work just as well for almost all of my uses as Microsoft Office, and the price just can't be beaten unless Uncle Bill comes to my house and pays me money to use his applications. But whenever I'm doing something that involved more than just popping it open and tossing out a quick letter, Microsoft Word is the way to go.
I'm not a programmer, so unfortunately, all I can do is sit around and wish and hope that at some point, the OpenOffice development team, folks a lot smarter than I am, comes up with something a bit easier to use in automating the suite.
Seriously, does it matter? Some things just won't gain huge, widespread acceptance, displacing a massive, well funded market monopolist. OOo is great (I use it now) but I can't see it getting supported. Christ, I just got off the phone to Tech Support at Bigpond (biggest broadband supplier in Australia), they don't support anything except Outlook Express and Outlook. If a simple email app can't get supported, what hope is there for a 100MB+ Office suite?
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
Our parners and us have developed such a thing - an education CD named "Tuxedooo". You can see for yourself here: http://www.infoweekend.com/t2.html It is a complete education suite, with examples and everything, tailored to fit non-technical user. Very simple and straightforward. It covers basics of Linux, OpenOffice.org applications, and even deals with migrating from MS Office to OpenOffice. But we didn't sell many of those. Why? It turned out, our clients are much more interested in having MS Office education, and those who use OOo do like that CD, but the number of people that switched to OOo is just too small to be profitable here. That goes against the notion that you need to have good books about something if you want people to switch. It is rather that people first get some software, try it, realize that they need a book, and just then they go out and buy the book. Just because we have that CD on the market doesn't mean people will stampede into switching office suites. It does help, for sure, but it is just not the main factor. And frankly, 80% of people use it as a replacement for typewriter, a function that is easy to master in a few days without a book. I'd rather say that pirated copies of MS Office are the main showstopper for wide adoption of OOo.
So he prefers OO. So what? If this was a pro-Office article they'd be people here calling "FUD".
He writes that he's "used it [Outlook] and do not find it impressive". We all have opinions but as an Office user I'm not swayed by this. He continues "I use Thunderbird for my e-mail, and it beats Outlook in stability and ease of use by many miles". I can put my finger in the air to come up with unqualified rubbish too. In my experience Outlook is not unstable. Not at work, not at home. I can't remember having to restart it or watching it crash. This is just mud-slinging or the type that gets shot down when MS are perceived to do it.
Then there's the "more logical division" of separating other apps from email. I'd suggest otherwise. Working in a real office I notice there's quite of a lot of emailed Office documents going around. Word has a toolbar button to email the current document. Real people find this useful. There's also a lot of general emailing happening and quite a bit of meeting organising. With Outlook. I can even get someone's telephone extension by right-clicking their name in an email. Outlook 2003 also tells me when they're free by checking their calendar. All useful stuff. Can't see why they're shouldn't be a division in the real world: I can write Word documents without Outlook so what's the problem?
It might be that Office users are all working inefficiently or somehow incorrectly. But what they have works. In a real environment it could be argued email makes more sense of part of an office suite than a browser/internet app as some organisations limit web-browsing.
I can't understand why businesses seem so happy dropping so much money on Office, and aren't willing to investigate alternatives. For most people, especially those using the wordprocessor, and maybe spreadsheets, OOo is more than good enough.
:)
Your question was answered approx 8-12 years ago when Word + Excel pretty much took a strangle hold on the office desktop. Back then there were _many_ competitors to M$, from high end packages from large vendors (WordPerfect, Lotus, etc) to cheaper lower end packages. M$ hit upon the right set of functions, and probably more importantly, a nice integration with Windows that allowed them to ride the momentum. When it comes to business software, momentum and marketshare is everything. Now back then, people tried to distinguish themselves and sometimes did not try to maintain document level compatibility, and that definitely hurt some. And it's also true that many/most of those packages were not free, but as you state, that is not as big of a factor as one would think.
This is one area that I see FOSS folks really missing the boat on. They seem to ignore the past, back when there was _real_ competition, to understand why the market shaped itself like it did. If they would, then they'd see that it is not good enough to "be just as good" or to be "good enough". The article mentions having better training tools, I would argue that any system that needs that level of training will NEVER succeed in capturing any marketshare, free or not. When fighting the M$ beast, you can not attack head on, you must come in under (significantly more streamlined package that is very quick and easy to come up to speed, you can add functionality to bloat it later) or over (offer a truely integrated solution, not a confederation of multiple apps, be innovative, offer something that M$ doesn't).
I'd love to see some real competition back in the productivity suites again. But lets face it, ooo is really "the only other viable choice" vs being "the better choice". If there are any VC's reading, drop me a line, I have some ideas for how to attack the beast
No, it's not. That's exactly why most people/businesses aren't switching to the free-as-in-beer alternative and still cough up the cash for MS Office. Contrary to popular belief, I rather doubt most people using an office tool really do just type letters and view using right alignment as an advanced technique.
Before I continue, let me just say that I personally use OpenOffice at home and MS Office at work, and have done for several years now. I don't use office software enough at home for MS Office to be worth the asking price to me, and I don't believe in ripping off other people's software illegally, so OO it is. I'm grateful to those who give OO away so I can use it, and I'm not criticising them for having an inferior product. They are several years of development time behind MS here so it's unreasonable to expect the two to be similarly powerful/refined.
Having made that clear, I have to say that OO simply isn't up to scratch on usability yet. The other day I was editing a word processor document, and using a lot of small capitals formatting. I wanted to add a button to the toolbar or a shortcut key to make this easier, but in OO you can't. I was going to report this, but found there's already an open bug to this effect and has been for years. In general, the keyboard support in OO is weak, which near-fatal in a word processor: where are the easy ways to set keyboard shortcuts for styles, special characters, specific formatting, etc? Compare and contrast with Word, which has done this stuff in its sleep for years.
I try to think of a different example every time I make this point. Last time it was silly limitations in mail merging and fundamental weaknesses in the data sources model used in OO. Next time it'll probably be underpowered charting in Calc, or maybe the terrible keyboard and mouse behaviour when using things like tables and text boxes in Writer. The point is, MS Office products are quite mature now, and while they may not have changed much in years and certainly have places they could be improved, they have relatively few really daft shortcomings. OO just isn't there yet, which is why I'm happy to use it at home for fairly simple jobs, but wouldn't dream of recommending it for business use.
Ultimately, the feature list is a battle OO can never win, as long as they're trying to be a better MS Office than MS Office and always chasing the leader. Microsoft might give them a huge boost by actually sending MS Office backwards with the weird new interface, but I'd bet by release time there will be an option to switch that off. Meanwhile, if OO wants to start providing genuine advantages over the MS offering, it needs to stop trying to be that MS offering, and start focussing on improving its own features and particularly their usability, and on offering things MS Office can't (like page layout and typography options beyond kindergarten level, or genuinely useful writing aids, for example).
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Another thing that ties people to Microsoft Office is Outlook. I have used it and do not find it impressive. I use Thunderbird for my e-mail, and it beats Outlook in stability and ease of use by many miles.
This isn't possible in a corporate environment that uses Microsoft Exchange. The Evolution ximian-connector/exchange plugin is a good start, but there are some features that it doesn't support (the 'categories' field/column in your inbox, for example).
It's a shame, because I have to agree - Outlook is really REALLY bad. The version I'm using in work can't even block images!
Some people mistakenly think that Outlook Express is the same as Outlook. Others mistakenly think it is just email. Many mistakenly think that it can easily be replaced by $FAVORITE-MAIL-APP and others think that anything that connects to Exchange is fine. But, you all miss the biggest point of all. MOST people prefer using Outlook and Exchange to using any other mail client.
Outlook wins because that's what people like!!! As for the whole speed(bull) and stability argument, that's to be expected when you don't have nearly as much features or functionality. Meanwhile Evolution, which attempts to match Outlook's features and functionality, is a bloated and bug infested slug. Thunderbird cannot be compared with Outlook. It can't even be compared with Outlook Express.
There was a plastic boy who thought he was stretchable but he was only somewhat stretchable.
Thunderbird cannot be compared with Outlook. It can't even be compared with Outlook Express.
I disagree. I find Outlook Express to be quite slow and a bit cumbersome to use (especially when trying to use a PGP plugin). Thunderbird on the other hand, is much more snappy and the extension API makes PGP functionality a breeze (e.g. Enigmail).
In the corporate world, Excel is more of a platform than a simple spreadsheet these days. I have seen a multi-million dollar company essentially run off of three Excel spreadsheets with a ton of macros. The input data would come from some reports we generated off the database for them, and the finance people would enter them into the spreadsheets and let the macros morph the data into the views the senior management wanted to see.
I rather liked this arrangement because it empowered the users in finance by giving them a tool they could modify on their own, and it let us focus on building reports that made sense to finance without distilling it down to bullet points for senior management. It also meant we weren't in the direct line of fire when management didn't like the numbers they saw.
All in all very disappointing. How old is this guy? He comes off like a defensive 16 year old. "Oh yea, sun doesn't pay me to say this. Sun doesn't like me". Grow up, man.
OO is fantastic. It's really great, fairly easy to use, and best of all, it's free. That was my first impression.
Then I started attempting to make a document in traditional outline format. Something so easy to do in MS Word. In OO, however...
It is what my old buddy Clarky used to refer to as having a "50M-50B" problem: 50% of the problem is that it is mysterious, the other 50% of the problem is that once you figure it out, you realize it's broken.
So, while I will continue to use OO, I'm not fooling myself into thinking it is a completely viable alternative to MS Office. I'm doing it because I believe in free/open software. I suspect that within a year or so it will have perfectly implemented all the functionality of MS Office 97, at which point it will have gone as far as it needs to go. Then we can start talking about replacing MS Office on the corporate desktop. Until then, ideology will have to rule the day.
---don't make me break out my red pen.
Sheesh-- Why does everything on Slashdot have to devolve into some half-witted religious flamewar between Open Source and Proprietary software? I guess something rational, like a list of features with an (even moderately) unbiased comparison cuts down on the page views, or something.
Both Office suites have advantages and disadvantages. MS Office is fairly expensive, OO is free. Microsoft's VBA is relatively straightforward, OO's scripting is convoluted. Microsoft has annoyances like "personalized menus", while the Open Office interface is relatively static. Outlook provides some powerful tools for cooperative scheduling, which OO doesn't support. Open Office is infinitely more "tweakable" (if you're willing to poke around in the innards) while MS only provides the customization the they think you need. The list goes on and on.
My advice: Choose the feature set you need and then pick the office suite the provides it. If you can't live without macros and scripting and you aren't willing to deal with the convoluted scripting language of OO, pick Microsoft. If you're ethically opposed to using software you haven't paid for and can't afford MS Office, pick OO. If you prefer one interface over the other, choose the suite you prefer. But don't do the Office Suite Taliban thing... dare I say that it's "just" software?
Anyone willing to look at both suites openly and fairly will admit that Open Office is still somewhat behind MS Office in usability and functionality (in most areas). There are a lot of reasons for this: OO is relatively new, MS has more money to spend, MS's development efforts are centrally coordinated, etc. Open Office has, however, made some big strides forward from when I first used it, while Microsoft Office development seems to have stagnated.
As someone who spends most of my days writing, I can tell you that for some tasks, Writer works great, and for others, Word is a good choice. For a lot of my writing tasks, I use FrameMaker, because neither Writer nor Word can do the things I need. I pick the tool that works and use it.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
The COO at the company I work for is moving all the salespeople to POP3 so they can keep their e-mail local because of how bad Outlook is with IMAP access and its broken offline support.
Outlook uses MAPI to talk to Exchange! Why would anyone use IMAP instead??? Using the proper configuration, Outlook with MAPI in Exchange Caching mode(the default configuration), Outlook's offline operation is completely seemless and works everytime. Complete offline functionality of email, calendaring, and address books and when it sees the Exchange server, it all syncs up quite nicely, even with your wireless appendages. In fact, Outlook's offline operation is better than any other email/groupware applications, even GroupWise or Notes.
Your or your COO's assertion is completely baseless and makes no sense, unless you are one of those twats that doesn't know the difference between Outlook and Outlook Express.
Can't? Try this:
OOo is capable of many things. Maybe I should go add this to a wiki somewhere.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Indeed. As I've argued around these parts in the past, one area where today's word processors could seriously improve is to shift the UI focus and formatting tools from ad-hoc adjustments to the use of more powerful stylesheet and template features.
If they did this, a user who doesn't care about formatting would soon learn to add the "emphasized" tag instead of clicking italics. The way that emphasis within emphasis happens to toggle the formatting back to roman again will probably go unnoticed.
On the other hand, a user who does take a little care to make their documents look smart, or a corporate staffer setting up the office stylesheets and templates, would be able to format their documents more quickly and easily, and to help less knowledgeable colleagues to do likewise.
Alas, despite this suggestion getting several positive comments/mods here in the past, none of the major WP product teams seems to have any interest in improving this glaring weakness. C'est la vie.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
You really proved his point nicely. You offered seven fiddley and cumbersome steps that, in the end, still failed to accomplish what he wanted. He wanted a button on the tool bar! Like he can accomplish in four clicks in MS Word!
Don't add anything to a Wiki. Give the users what they want! And that's the whole point in a single statement. MS office gives them what they want. So much so that they're actually willing to pay top dollar for it, despite the availability of a, so called, "good enough" free alternative.
Maybe he doesn't want to use a proprietary protocol to collect his mail, as that would force everyone in his organisation to use outlook and nothing else.
Then maybe he shouldn't use Exchange. Since Exchange is the only server that speaks MAPI that would be the only time anyone would be "forced" to use a MAPI client like Outlook. But, you're not forced to use Outlook, even with Exchange, as it supports POP3 and IMAP for people that "have to use Thunderbird" to connect to an Exchange server. It must suck to be force to use Thunderbird. No calendaring, no presence indication, no wireless synchronization, no integration int mission critical business apps, no features. That's gotta suck!
No doubt outlook includes poor support for standard protocols to try and pressure people into using exchange
That's a bizarre way of looking at it. Here's a different view. One that is a little closer to the facts.
Outlook, originally designed as a client specifically for Microsoft Exchange, also has pretty good support for other protocols that users may want to use for connecting to third party servers such as those at their ISP. Those protocols include POP3, SMTP, IMAP, SMIME, LDAP, and many more. All of these implementations are known to work effectively, at least at a basic level with most, if not all, third part mail and calendaring systems. There are even plugins that allow Outlook to function natively with some proprietary groupware systems such as GroupWise and Notes.
Also, before you get too excited about the saddle spur of your high horse being shoved up your ass, I'd like to point out that up until a year ago, Thunderbird was renowned for having a crappy IMAP implementation and KMail is still known to blow chunks in the offline IMAP world.
Finally, all this talk about IMAP support is rather pointless to me since most ISP's do not even offer IMAP support. In fact, perhaps most strangely, the only major ISP to offer IMAP is AOL! Sure you can setup your own server to do IMAP using Cyrus or GroupWise Or Notes or Exchange but, those systems all have far superior proprietary protocols for that sort of thing and they only offer IMAP so that whiners like you that "have to use Thunderbird" can also connect. But, you still have a much better experience when you use the intended client and the intended protocol.
Outlook 2003 was a major improvement over the previous version IMO. The entire Office 2003 suite was one of the few new Microsoft products that I liked from the first moment I tried it. If that's "decay" then I'd say Microsoft has a few more good years in them.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.